Flat Rock, My Ass.

Two days of gardening in Flat Rock, North Carolina at my friend's house.
The name of the town in this particular case is misleading as the rocks are not so much flat as shattered into hundreds of pieces and scattered about the back garden of her place.

Day one included denuding the area of every weed known to mankind and getting lashed across the face with a swathe of poison oak. Lovely. Yet, we managed to get the area clear and then take off to all the nurseries of the area with a vengeance and purchase a Japanese Maple and a "Burning Bush". Lovely Autumn additions to what is becoming an Asian-inspired, terraced rock garden.

Dig the hole, add the soil, scream at what you thought was a rock as it uncurls itself into some creepy hybrid of Cricket/Locust/Tarantula and run for the refrigerator where all the Coors Light is kept. Sit for a few moments, sweat like a field hand, stare blandly into space, start an argument--just to get the blood flowing and then back to the Back 40.
By the end of the first day, we really began to have something nice.

Day 2:
The Rental of the Log Splitter. A GIANT Jurassic Maple Tree fell over in their yard and the bottom-most parts of the trunk are positioned around their fire pit. The rest of this monstrous tree snakes off into the woods like some long dead, serpentine remnant. As we hauled them all over to the log splitter, I pulled all the weeds (some taller than I) out of the soft ground. At 9 am, we started a fire and at 11 pm that night, it was still going. Unbelievable. Logs, rotten fence, weeds and Rhododendrons all chucked on this inferno as we saw a garden emerge.

On a personal note, I loathe Rhododendrons.
They are gritty, bulbous and the flowers are ugly.
Like dirty, fat people with bad hair. No wonder it's the Regional Flower of The South.

12 pain-killers, umpteen beers and countless cracks and groans later, I returned home to sleep. We later sat around the fire pit and roasted hot dogs, made S'mores (Have never had those things... wow) and drank champagne...

From cursing the ground in the am, to drone-like work in the pm, to catatonic champagne stare in the darkness, "Never again!!", became... "Look at all that wood we found... You know... an ARBOR...and what about Wisteria???"

Bland stares became bright-eyed, whispering complicity as our backs heal, her husband rolls his eyes and we think about tomorrow...